Yet another example of how sexism can creep into academia: as CMU’s business incubator became more prestigious, its female founder’s role became marginalized.
Read an interview with Dr. Blum in NEXT Pittsburgh: Lenore Blum shocked the community with her sudden resignation from CMU. Here she tells us why.
Coverage from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: 2 CMU computer science professors — including founder of Project Olympus incubator — resign
Nature came out with a News article reporting that, for women who land a large NIH grant, their mid- and late-career funding tracks about the same as men.
Leaky pipeline for women scientists dries up after they win first big grant
Sounds promising, right? But there’s more to the story. The original article published in PNAS by Lisa A. Hechtman et al, gives more details (including those listed below).
Good news: women now earn more doctorates in the life sciences, comprising 55% of the recipients in 2016. This trend has held since 2006, according to the NSF’s statistics.
Data plotted from NSF Table 14: Doctorate recipients, by broad field of study and sex
Bad news: according to the same table, the gender gaps are still large for physical & earth sciences, math & CS, and engineering.
Data plotted from NSF Table 14: Doctorate recipients, by broad field of study and sex
But that’s for another post.
Bad news: despite the gender parity in doctorate recipients, women are underrepresented among assistant professors (even accounting for a postdoctoral research delay).
Bad news: women submit less than one-third of NIH research proposals, according to the NIH.
Good news: women who do submit NIH research proposals are as successful as men in obtaining first-time grants.
Good news: the paper studied “funding longevity” among first-time grant awardees between 1991 and 2010, and found that women’s success in securing funding over their careers in this cohort were nearly as good as men (there’s still a gender gap, but it’s small).
Bad news: other gender differences exist when comparing men and women in this cohort of investigators, though the differences are smaller than the previous numbers. For example, women are less likely to attempt to renew grants and are less successful in the NIH grant renewal process, which is a factor that leads to sustained funding for both genders.
So a mix of good news and bad news, some signs of progress, and indications of where career support may stop the “leaky pipeline.”
Wired just came out with an article about the Ada Lace children’s books, written by Emily Calandrelli. I love the nod to Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who wrote the first computer programs — in the mid-1800s.
You can buy one book (or the whole series) on Amazon.
The Inside Higher Ed blog just had a short opinion article by M. Soledad Caballero and Aimee Knupsky at Allegheny College about the praise of “Prickly Women.” A quote from the article appears below.
They are known throughout history as the “killjoys,” the “ice queens,” the “hysterics,” the “ball-busters.” They are the “Prickly Women” — the women who don’t let things go, who stand up for themselves and others, and who question the status-quo of structural inequities and outdated institutional practices. They stick out decidedly among the “bro-hood” of academic administration.
Despite the negative connotations and perceptions they incite, Prickly Women have exactly the kind of insight and persistence needed as the crises in higher education continue to mount.
A recent paper by Holman et al. in PLOS Biology presents a new look at the gender gap in publications for millions of authors from over one hundred countries in over six thousand journals. You can interact with the data through their web app.
The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented?
Luke Holman, Devi Stuart-Fox, Cindy E. Hauser, PLOS Biology 2018.
The authors present the current author gender ratio, its rate of change per year, and the estimate number of years until the gender ratio comes with 5% of parity. A few notes below the image…
Here are the first things I noticed:
The paper’s supplementary figure S3 shows data for Computer Science (from arXiv). Based on current trajectories, only two sub-categories (Information Theory and Robotics) hope to see gender parity within the next 50-100 years. We still have a long way to go.
From Mike the Mad Biologist’s blog, I learned about Marie Tharp, the woman who mapped the ocean floor. The amazing story is described in the articles below:
Seeing Is Believing: How Marie Tharp Changed Geology Forever (smithsonian.com)
Four facts about Marie Tharp, the woman whose art mapped the bottom of the sea (massivesci.com)
Credit: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the estate of Marie Tharp, from the smithsonian.com article linked below.
Here’s a fascinating story about the women who helped break codes during WWII. The article appeared as part of ACM TechNews, and is excerpted from the book Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy.
via The Secret History of the Female Code Breakers Who Helped Defeat the Nazis – POLITICO Magazine
(Thanks to Barbara Ryder, emeritus professor and former chair of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, for the pointer)
Yesterday was Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating the achievements of women in STEM. If you don’t know about Ada or her legacy, this article is worth a read:
Ada Lovelace Day Honors “the First Computer Programmer” – Scientific American Blog Network
Ada is always a presence in the compbio lab (thanks to Nicole Ezell ’16):
While more high school girls are taking the Computer Science AP exam, workplace culture needs to change before this improvement will translate to a gender balance in the workforce. Nice article from Wired:
More Women Are Learning Computer Science! Now, About Those Jobs… | WIRED
As a researcher who works with large publicly available biological datasets, I was reminded of the potential biases in big data when I came across this blog post from the University of Michigan Health Lab:
How Genomic Sequencing May Be Widening Racial Disparities in Cancer Care . Nicole Fawcett, Aug 17, 2106.
Cancer is a notoriously heterogeneous disease, meaning that different patients with the same cancer type may harbor different sets of mutations. Further, many genes associated with cancer tend to be mutated at very low frequencies in tumors [1]. In order to gain enough statistical power to confidently identify these rare “driver” mutations, we need data from hundreds to thousands of tumor samples. Obtaining such a large number of samples often requires collecting tissues whenever possible.
The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) is a massive data repository for dozens of cancers, containing data from hundreds to thousands of individuals for most cancer types. The post above describes a recent study that determined the racial breakdown of tumor samples in 10 of the 31 tumor types from TCGA. They found that while the samples were racially diverse — even, in some cases, matching the U.S. population — the number of African-American, Asian, and Hispanic samples were too small to identify group-specific mutations with 10% frequency for any tumor type except breast cancer in African-Americans. On the other hand, there were enough Caucasian samples in every tumor type to identify mutations with 10% frequency in the population (and 5% frequency for 8 of the 10 tumor types assessed). Consequently, we identify more “rare” mutations that pertain to Caucasians simply because we have more data to support the findings. Further, only 3% of the total samples were Hispanic, while Hispanics comprise 16% of the U.S. population.
This disparity is not limited to a race. Gender representation in big cancer data has also been in the press. The under-representation of women in sex-nonspecific cancer over the past 15 years has been reviewed by Hoyt and Rubin (Cancer 2012), who noted that this gap may be widening.
Want to see the discrepancies for yourself? The data is easy enough to obtain, but Enpicom has a fantastic interactive visualization of the entire TCGA data repository by patient gender, race, and age.
Consider glioma, for example – while the incidence rate of brain tumors is higher in women than in men [2], women comprised only 41.4% of the over 1,100 samples.
Even more alarmingly, over 88% of the samples are Caucasian.
There is evidence of higher incidence rates of brain cancer in Caucasians compared African-Americans and Hispanics, but surely this doesn’t justify the over-representation in this dataset.
On one hand, we need to carefully design data collection efforts to ensure that different racial/ethnic groups are adequately represented – not simply to reflect the proportion in the U.S. population but to gain enough statistical power to confidently identify rare mutations. On the other hand, “convenience sampling” methods of obtaining tumors from the most convenient places, even if the population is homogenous, have enabled consortia to collect enough data in the first place. In fact, we better understand the “rare mutation” concept due to the mostly-white patient data collected by TCGA and others.
The only clear answer is that we need more data.
[1] This is often called the “long tail” distribution of cancer gene mutations. For more information, see, for example, Lessons from the Cancer Genome. Garraway and Lander. Cell 2013.
[2] All primary malignant and non-malignant brain and CNS tumors. In fact, the incidence rate of malignant brain tumors is slightly higher in men. Cancer statistics from the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States.
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